What’s the Right Path Forward Toward Ensuring All Children Have Health Coverage?

Later this week we will be releasing our annual report on the state of children’s coverage looking at state trends. It’s no secret that the news will not be good – as I blogged about when the Census Bureau released the data a few weeks back, the number of uninsured children had its largest annual jump last year. While children continue to have lower uninsured rates than adults, the positive movement forward has halted and reversed for both.

So how best to turn the situation around? To explore that question, I had the privilege of co-authoring an article with two women that I admire greatly – Genevieve Kenney (Vice President, Health Policy at the Urban Institute) and Sara Rosenbaum (Professor of Health Law and Policy, George Washington University). We outline different paths to moving towards universal coverage for children in this month’s special issue about children in the journal Health Affairs.  You can read the piece here. Given the space constraints and the issue’s focus, the piece focuses solely on children, but of course it goes without saying that coverage for all is where we need to be.

Given the dark times we are experiencing, it was a pleasure taking the time to think about paths to better days with two such amazing colleagues.

Joan Alker is the Executive Director of the Center for Children and Families and a Research Professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy.

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